Read For Comprehension

The tropics are calm and I have been finishing little jobs around the apartments that I have wanted to take care of for an extended time. I have been dragged back to the keyboard by the media. Before writing commentary on something one should ‘read for comprehension’ the basis for the commentary.

1. Dr. Professor Senator Elizabeth Warren was elected to the Senate in 2012. A Senator serves for 6 years. She is not running for President, she is running for Senator in an election that takes place in a little over two weeks.

2. Trump was not the first politician to attack DPS Warren over the issue of her ancestry, it was Scott Brown in the 2012 Senatorial race. The issue of her race keeps being brought up by Republicans, and she used the route that Trump indicated was most authoritative to resolve it for her current election. She didn’t actually believe that Trump would make good on his bet, or that what she did would actually put the issue to rest. The Republicans don’t believe that reality, truth, or the facts matter, but maybe a majority of voters do. It would help if the media did. 😈

3. As was clearly stated in the announcement of the DNA results, the test can only show if someone has a Native American ancestor and only provides a range of possibilities for how long ago that ancestor lived. DNA cannot show membership in any particular tribe, as it only deals with with large groups. DPS Warren has not claimed membership in any tribe, and stated that individual tribes have the right to determine their own rules for membership.

4. As a former member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Board at a public college in New York State, I understand why colleges and universities track minority representation among staff and faculty. Many of these institutions are under court mandated hiring policies based on a history of discrimination. In Senator Warren’s case, she would have received a bigger hiring advantage for being a woman than a Native American as a law school professor. That advantage would not translate into tenure, and certainly not into an endowed chair, things she achieved. She had the publication credentials and citations to be among the top of her field. The entire ‘Native American’ listing was done by the EEOB at those institutions to make their stats look better, and yes, they would have done it based on nothing more that ‘my mother used to tell us that one of her great grandparents was a Native American.’